


A Teacup of Taddies

by GoldenThreads



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Alternate Universe - Merpeople, Eel Hubert von Vestra, Ferdibert Week 2020 (Fire Emblem), Human/Monster Romance, Kid Fic, M/M, but like. the kids are murderous noodles?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-25
Updated: 2021-02-24
Packaged: 2021-03-13 03:55:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 8
Words: 12,533
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29645394
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GoldenThreads/pseuds/GoldenThreads
Summary: Sometimes a family is a father, an eel, and sixty-two tadpoles.It just takes a little work to get there.
Relationships: Edelgard von Hresvelg & Hubert von Vestra, Ferdinand von Aegir/Hubert von Vestra
Comments: 13
Kudos: 106





	1. Espionage

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Froggie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Froggie/gifts).



> Here are some drabbles I did over on twit, now with a shiny new epilogue! 
> 
> This series is in homage to Frog's eelberts ([art here](https://twitter.com/oversized_frog/status/1364400608451690500), nsfw!), which set off a full swamp of glorious eelfucking (especially destroyed by [jinx22's Ink Filled!](https://archiveofourown.org/works/22480810/chapters/53717263) nsfw!). Which all made me VERY annoying because you can't tell me there's eggs and expect me not to go on wild fits of fancy about what happens next. 
> 
> Backstory: Vague, choose-your-own Ferdibert eelventure. Eggs are mentioned, but the exact logistics are not. Follow your heart and/or your horny. This is about what comes next.
> 
> General warnings for violence & viscera, since this is a tale of carnivorous deep-sea murder noodles whose instincts have them gobbling up humans for snacks. (But just this once, Ferdinand is not the snack. **A** snack, always. **THE** snack, no.)

Water splashes. 

Three of Them peek out of the nest to investigate. Sometimes creatures from the Beyond intrude upon their calm waters, stabbing down into the murk on their graceless forked tails, all stiff bone. If the intruders stay too long, creep too far into the depths of their dark cave, then Sire always rises from his burrow to scare them away. All intruders except one. 

The Shining visitor always moves slow. It splashes because it is not from the Beneath, and it calls in loud rumbles that ripple through the shallows. It is impossible to look at the creature directly, all bright color twisting in the shadows and as raw as the sunfire that peeks in through the mouth of the cave, a heat they have been taught to shun. When Shining arrives, the nestlings all huddle together to listen to its voice in wonder. Some of Them dream of chirping back someday.

For now, the Three swim forth to dare a closer look. 

Sire glides effortlessly through the depths of their den, placing himself between Them and Shining. He heaves himself out of the tidal pool and bares long, dripping teeth, and They know not to be afraid. They are protected. They are cherished.

Shining is not afraid either. His voice is a song as he says, “Hubert.”

“Back again so soon?” hisses Sire, but the harshness of his words is betrayed by the lithe curl of his tail around Shining’s ankle. 

Shining takes a seat with his strange twin appendages hanging down into the water. Close enough for investigation, if not for the way the tip of Sire’s tail flicks angry currents away from its prize.

“We are neighbors, are we not?” Shining cranes forward and sends his own shadows drifting over the surface. 

The Three cannot get any closer. If They try to wriggle through the shallows between one pool and the next, They may be _seen,_ and Sire has warned there is no greater danger than that. But Shining is _right there!_

“You are the one who took up residence here,” Shining continues. His voice pitches into a lower tone, like when Sire croons Them to restful sleep. “Strange that you would nest so close to shore if you never wanted to see me again.”

Sire snarls. “Not everything is about you, Ferdinand.”

Fur..?

The Three drift into a triangle, letting the small tendrils of Their gill-stalks grasp onto each other as They ponder this development.

_Furd?_

_Furd end._

Sire says They are _wrong,_ that They cannot swim free in the Beneath outside the cave. They crave too much sound, too much touch, too much knowledge instead of obeying instinct. Sire could not pick apart the beats of the language Beyond until he was long as a rowboat. He did not explain what a rowboat was, but They knew it meant _long_ and _old._

And Sire is old indeed, if he thinks _Furredy-end_ is a good name for Shining! Just because there is strange plumage attached to his head, a crown of prickly seaweed the same color that flares when the Beneath eats the Sun each sleepfall. It is a very nice crown. They would never give Shining such a nasty name. No wonder Sire has failed to keep Shining around.

“I am well aware of the limits of my significance, thank you.” Shining dips his blunted claw down into the pool, and _oh,_ if only They were close enough to leap into that reaching palm. 

He scoops up Sire’s tail instead, which goes effortlessly pliant, and soon Shining is pressing his thumbs into the thick muscle, kneading into the slick, smooth skin with constant pressure.

Sire hums down in the Beneath, a vibration through the whole of the cave. 

It is, frankly, gross. 

“It is only that I feel my significance in this _particular_ matter is without question.” 

Shining sounds so serious, almost as serious as Sire, that the bravest of the Three peeps dark eyes above the surface for the length of five whole bubbles. 

Strange! They report to the others. Shining bares his teeth with every word. He watches Sire’s own teeth and tongue. All aggression, but they do not fight. 

“And which matter is that?” 

“I am simply wondering about all the _eggs_ that—well. You know.”

Eggs?

_They_ came from eggs! 

Was Shining talking about _Them?!_ Did he—

The wind in the cave howls with the force of Sire’s tail whipping free of Shining’s claws and smacking against the surface of the water. Everything trembles, and They flee in fear, wriggling into the cracks of the spiny seaweed Sire uses to decorate their den. Back in the nest, Their siblings shiver and cry useless bubbles into the dark.

“Begone, human,” Sire roars like a clap of thunder just before the skywaters fall. “Unless you are truly so eager for me to make a meal of you.”

“I take it you did not nest for me, but for _them._ Are they here?” Shining asks flatly, and then there is a sickening _crack_ that arcs through the Beneath.

Shining’s blood drips into the water.

_“I will not warn you again.”_

They cling together in the silence that comes after. They do not yet bring the good message home to the nest. They watch where the water runs red.

Shining wants to meet Them.


	2. Secret

If Hubert meant to scare Ferdinand off for good, he ought to have taken the entire arm. A few bloody scratches are nothing. The cuts will not even scar, and they hurt far less than the scouring salt of the deep sea, where Hubert once carved long trenches of pleasure into his back and thighs.

Ferdinand glances at those still-tender scars in the mirror as he throws on his clothes, the furrows shadowed by the candle’s flickering light. Another three hours at most until the sun rises. He must be quick.

A half hour’s ride outside the village, the rocky plains give way to the cliffs of Aegir, that sharp sheaf of stone that arches out over the breaking waves. Though the ocean rarely settles into a gentler shore, it carves strange caverns and pools among the crags. It is here that Hubert has made his home, in a small break in the rock where the water flows slow and shallow before dropping into an endless dark. 

Ferdinand is not some adventurer enthralled by a few days of admittedly adventurous coitus, as Hubert seems to believe. He reads thoroughly and widely about the world, and it has been no struggle to extend his reach to the myths of merfolk and the mating patterns of eels. He knows Hubert has broken all demands of instinct and tradition by nesting at all, let alone in a place so close to where landfolk built their own dwellings. He knows the, ah, results of their congress were viable. 

He knows no man, mer, or creature most foul will stand or swim between him and his true-born child.

Ferdinand has also learned, through much observation, that merfolk are not accustomed to looking _up._ For days he has sat up on the cliff above Hubert’s nest and charted his mate’s comings and goings. Hubert scans the waterline with ferocious intensity, yet never arches his neck for a higher view — his neck may not bend that way at all, as his free movement in the ocean means he can simply adjust his body instead. But at the surface there is little way to look up without turning his belly to the sky.

The hunt always begins two hours before sunrise, well before any of the fishing boats set out. A long, dark shadow slices eastward through the choppy waters. It will return with the dawn, dragging the unbroken corpses of sturgeon and catfish back into the den. In the evening, Hubert carries the clean bones back out to sea. On that second jaunt he is more…whimsical. Ferdinand has seen him return with necklaces of bright seaweed and armfuls of stinging jellies, stolen fishermen’s nets dragging behind him laden with oysters.

That lithe shadow is just slipping away over the horizon as Ferdinand creeps to the edge of the cliff. Excellent. The hunt never takes less than an hour, which leaves plenty of time for Ferdinand to scale his way down the unforgiving cliffs and make a thorough investigation of Hubert’s den. 

The sky has grown light enough to illuminate every helpful hand and foot hole upon his descent, but offers no such help with the cave itself. Ferdinand figured out how to contort himself to fit through the narrow crevasse last time. The pitch darkness within is another matter, and he has brought no torch for fear Hubert could smell its burn.

Unforgiving silence suffuses the den. Ferdinand can hear every gentle lap of the water as it spills from one pool to the next, can hear the thrum of his own heart battering onward. From what he saw on the previous visit, there are a series of low pools along the walls where murky water sits stagnant, filled with fields of spiny seaweed. The center of the cave cuts a deep trough that drops down into a subterranean pit — does Hubert swim through an underground system to reach his true den? There is no way for Ferdinand to tell how far the pit goes; the water rises up to his waist before he retreats back to more certain depths.

As he sits on the shelf of a rock to regain his bearings, he hears it.

_Plop._

Not the drip of water from his hair, no regularity of gravity, this. Ferdinand’s heart skips a beat, as if that singular _plop_ was his own heart’s deserter.

“Hello?” he calls. 

Strange how there is no echo in such an oppressive silence.

“Do not be afraid. I am a friend.” 

Or at least he hopes to be. So dearly.

“Please. I only wish to meet you.” Ferdinand’s eyes scan the darkness without success, and he drops his head into his hands.

_Plop._

Ferdinand jolts and looks around wildly. It was closer this time. If only he could—

He shuts his eyes tight in frustration, and the next moment it comes again: _Plop. Plop. Plop._

And that must be the trick. They fear his sight—his eyes shine strangely in some unearthly light, perhaps. 

“I will keep my eye closed,” he swears with trembling voice. “I promise to you.”

_Plop._

_Plop plop plop plop plop._

Something touches Ferdinand’s hand, cool and smooth, and all noise stops. He waits a full two minutes of breathless wonder, then opens his eyes to stare down at the small piece of sea glass now sitting next to his pinky finger. No, not glass at all but amber, glowing a bloody orange as he holds it to the cracks of light beginning to make it past the cave’s opening.  
It is precisely the same color as his hair.

But dawn is breaking in, and soon Hubert will arrive with his gory prizes, and Ferdinand clutches the stone to his chest as he surveys the shadowy gloom once more.

“Thank you,” he whispers true. 

There is no movement. There is no other sound.

At the mouth of the cave, Ferdinand turns back to watch a thin streak of orange drift through the deep like a lonely strand of copper wire.


	3. Brush with death

There is Sick in the water. 

In the Beneath—the _real_ Beneath, outside of this den that grows more cramped by the day—the water never stops flowing and cleaning the world around. But the safe, calm waters of the den create a danger of _Sick._

This was the first lesson Sire ever taught Them. It is why They are not allowed to keep the fascinating festering remains of Their meals, though sometimes Sire will bring old, shiny white bones to add to the collection instead. It is why, when the storms come, Sire barricades Them down in the burrow with his body coiled tight overhead, allowing the raging waters to break through the cavern and sweep all the old standing pools back out to sea. It is why Sire transplants Them from one tide pool to another every few days, helping each nestling cross to fresher water and observing Their growing strength. 

Today after sleeprise, after Sire slips away for the hunt, Smallest leaves the nest to make its way across the channel. The pools on the far side of the cavern are fresher. Sire will bring them there soon. Smallest wants the best seaweed, the best nook, the best bed, and must get there first to claim them.

But something is wrong. Its swimming slows, weaves and arcs in strange angles, like when Sire brings jellies to sting Them so They will grow brave.

The Three dive after Smallest and slog through the Sick, where the water has turned thick and sweet. It whirls in Their eyes, and it takes all Their strength to push Smallest back over the barrier to the current pool.

The other nestlings gather seaweed to barricade the low walls, but when the tide laps up over the rock, it does nothing to strain out the Sick. 

They need Sire. 

Even the Three are not strong enough to make it through the Sick, much less to venture outside the cavern’s mouth and seek Sire in the Beyond. Smallest twitches and floats restlessly near the surface. Something is Wrong Wrong Wrong and Their eyes _hurt,_ as if something is there that cannot break free, a barrier to this ache and sorrow.

_Where is Sire?_

And then the landsharks come.

They are like Shining. They are nothing like Shining. They stomp on heavy forked tails, sending spray flying, and their claws are burdened with long weighted nets. 

The nestlings sink into their stiff labyrinths of seaweed. Their gill-stalks tremble and reach out to each other for the only comfort They know. 

_WhereisSirewhereisSirewhereisSire?_

“Fuck,” grunts one of the landsharks. It splashes at the fouled water and hollers into the dark. “The fish isn’t here!”

“Calm down. It’ll be back soon enough.”

“Not if it scents the damn drug and turns tail.”

“No. They don’t build no den for nothing. We find whatever treasure it’s got in here, and the fish’ll swim right into the trap. Easy.”

But Sire’s only treasure is Them.

The landsharks make their way further down the central channel, balancing awkwardly on the rocky outcroppings all but invisible down in the dark. They have none of Sire’s grace in navigation.

One feels around with its forked tail in vain. All their belongings are hidden in the far deeper cracks. The other landshark dips its claws into the far tide pools, rummaging through oyster shells and the small stones that the bravest of Them have gathered from the mouth of the cave. 

Some of Them want to scream across the den and _**bite**_ , but instinct will not lend speed or strength or bestow Sire’s vicious jaws upon Them. 

_Ours,_ cries the thrum of so many tiny heartbeats. 

It is life They should cry for instead. The landsharks turn to the next tide pool, where dozens of Them hide beneath the thick clods of seaweed. There will be no escape. Some might make it down to the depths of Sire’s burrow—some, not all.

Sire brought treasures from a wreckage of the deep, once. A half-shell of bone and blue. He scooped Them up in squirming, happy piles by the dozen and poured Them back into the water just as quick. _A teacup of tadpoles,_ Sire had murmured to himself, before They could understand to whom he spoke. _What would you say if I offered such a gift?_

Maybe one teacup of Them will remain after the landsharks take hold of the seaweed and _squish._

“Oy!” calls a voice. 

The landsharks go still.

Shining scrambles through the mouth of the cave, wreathed in sunfire by the breaking dawn.

Never have They wanted to watch him more, but as the world breaks into shouting and splashing and chaos, all Their courage goes up in bubbles. They shiver. They pray, without knowing what it means, only that Shining must be victorious, must be the Sun itself, must—

“This is my land,” Shining announces. His voice booms. He has positioned himself deeper in the cavern than the landsharks, so that the intruders’ path to freedom is clear. “You are trespassing here. I will ask you only once: Leave.”

The landsharks laugh and lunge. The disturbed waters splash over the lip of the pools, and They smell it. Blood. 

Shining falls. The landsharks stumble back.

And courage goes up in bubbles once more. The nestlings bolt from their hiding places in a flicker of movement. The smaller, weaker ones _breathe,_ with fury and fear and adoration, a massive cloud of angry suds rising from the dark like Shining’s blood set to boil. The strong ones scurry into the dark and disturb the treasures of Their hoard, drawing the white chunks of bone to the surface in terrifying warning. Off run the landsharks in wildest fear.

The nestlings surround Shining, nipping at where his wound hits the water, the Sick. They curl into his hair. They wrap around the sunstone he wears at his throat.

He looks down at Them. They are seen.

Shining chokes, “Hello, lovelies.”

He bares his white teeth as his eyes crinkle shut. And then, slowly, the wrinkles of his face soften. His breathing slows.

He does not sing to Them anymore.


	4. Hurt/Comfort

Ferdinand is not sure what drew him down to the shore that day. He had plans in the city, tickets for the opera house that he purchased five months out so that he could chaperone all his lady friends to such a grand performance. But he woke early with a heavy heart, and—well, even with a morning detour to the cliffs to watch Hubert venture forth on his hunt, there would still be time to ride back home, change, and set out for the opera.

A half mile’s vantage showed wagon wheel-troughs in the mud.

A half hour’s careful investigation brought him to the trappers.

A half second’s fury brought him—

He winces, shifting on broken rock and slimy seaweed. A knife wound to the gut, by the blazing pain of it. It must not have hit anything vital or he wouldn’t be waking up at all.

When Ferdinand shifts, the slime shifts with him. He freezes, lanced through with panic sharper than the pain itself. Hubert is a slippery bastard indeed, but only by nature, not by feel. Unless the eel has slathered him up in a healing goo of some kind—unlikely, since Ferdinand’s head is balanced precariously on the rocks, his mouth too close to the water for comfort—then this is…something else.

He cracks his eyelids open, praying the fans of eyelashes will mask his return to consciousness. 

The moment he does, the undertow of _Wrong_ nearly snatches him back into the roiling dark.

His entire chest squirms with writhing, gelatinous maggots.

Hubert never returned. Ferdinand has laid here too long, wounds festering, and now all that remains is nausea and horror and the plaintive cry that rises up from his throat, stifled only by a rush of sudden tears.

_Peep._

Yet there is no pain, save the stitch in his side. And the longer his song of suffering, the more small chirps join in. The smallest creaks of noise. Some only bubbles. All driven to sorrow by his frantic sobbing.

_Driiii. Pip peeeep. Ruuuu._

The anxious slither of his chest goes still, and the only movement is a tiny nudge against his temple. Tap, tap, tap, like the measured beat of a mother’s hand stroking down her infant’s scant hair.

Slowly, the fear passes. It is accustomed to fleeing as quickly as it flares, after such a strange courtship with an eel for a suitor. Mere instinct that serves Ferdinand on land but has no place in the greater deep. He braces himself.

When he opens his eyes once more, full and bright with awareness, it is to hundreds of glossy black eyes peering up at him. Each is flat and lifeless, but Ferdinand feels now the thrum of intelligence in them, the curious concern. For each pair of eyes is a body fat as a grape, though terrifyingly fragile, all their joints and knobs of cartilage visible through the transparent membranes of their skin. Soft smudges of red linger around their bulbous heads, and dark shadows already line the length of their bodies, some as long as Ferdinand’s hand. Not maggots at all.

His hatchlings.

This is what Hubert has been hiding, what he could not protect out in the thankless sea. A host of tender noodles that have cherished Ferdinand in his weakness. He lies fallen over one of the tidal pools, soaked up to his neck, but the fattest of the little ones have nudged his face away from the lapping water, and there is a lithe length of seaweed pressed over the wound in his side. 

They are tiny terrors, nothing but tail and ridges of white where their teeth have already started to sharpen, and Ferdinand’s heart kicks up in a storm of affection. Salt tips from the corners of his eyes, swallowed up by the gentle waters.

Ferdinand studied eels, you see. He knows that once the eggs are lain, the parents curl together around their spawn like a two-headed dragon guarding a precious hoard, shielding them from the cold, the predators, the uncaring currents. A duty Hubert must have accomplished alone, and accomplished so well that the children remembered that fierce sense of safety, for now they curl over and above Ferdinand with the same desperation, driven to protect him with their own feeble bodies.

“Good morning,” he whispers, praying it does not send them scattering in fear.

But no, the warm rumble of his chest only sends them burrowing further into the now-ruined velveteen of his vest and jacket. They are happy under his eyes, showing none of the tense anxiety of their father who expected rejection around every bend.

He flexes a wrist in shallow movements, newly horror-struck by the notion of harming any of the children in his foggy-headed fumbling. There are none clinging to his right hand, which dangles into the deeper water aside the tidal pools, and with immense care he pulls it over to his chest.

The first tadpole freezes firm under the touch to its bony crown, small gill-stalks swaying in the water. Then, quick as a blink, it turns to offer Ferdinand its belly instead. He squishes down with the slightest pressure and draws a circle on its fat tummy. It flashes tiny slips of fin where arms might someday sprout, and then wriggles away to zoom through Ferdinand’s waterlogged hair and remind him that that, too, has become nest for dozens. 

Another pushes under his finger for pettings, and another after that. They are all tremendously polite, if over-eager. No more than four or five seek his attention at a time — if Hubert has truly refined the art of teaching children to share, he ought to share it with humankind as well.

Some swim for him, showing the rare streaks of red and orange that color their dark tails. Others demonstrate the sharpness of their teeth, nibbling against his nail beds as if struggling to lift a thousand pounds, until one little bastard draws blood straight through the nail and Ferdinand has to put a stop to the challenge. 

One sings. Or tries to, at least, its whole body shivering with the force of a single _peep._

And then all those eyes turn back upon Ferdinand, expectant and wild, and. Well.

The opera simply cannot compare to serenading his own kin.


	5. Nightmares

Yes, this is exactly what his day needs. Corpses on his doorstep. As if Hubert has nothing better to do than dispose of tedious fleshbags. 

That he killed the two men in question is neither here nor there. They are trespassers. The moment they disturbed the waters near his den, near his own over-curious and terrifyingly delicate brood, corpses they became. All it took was a severed throat and crumpled skull to make it so.

Meat, fresh for his clicking jaws. How long since he last fed on those fatty landwalkers? The heart, the liver—nothing compares in all the endless blue. His stomach howls for them even now. His eyes trace the thick of their thighs, the lines where joints will snap for easy dislocation. 

Two dead _humans._

His stomach twitches in agonized rejection, acid curdling behind his thin lips. No. Hubert does not need to wet his teeth on their blood to know there is no sweetness there, no burn of love’s brutality. 

Which leaves only bodies to be disposed of.

After a true hunt, he always brings his pickings home for his spawn to taste, to let them savor the spoils of violence and learn the softest spaces for their teeth to sever their prey’s nervous systems. To minimize cleanup.

Hubert snarls a cloud of bubbles. It is a great shame that he cannot allow them to sample human flesh, but it is what it is. 

He reaches out to pluck the glassy eyes from his kills, flicking them away towards the gulls before he gets peckish. One long claw sinks into each revealed cavern, freeing his other fingers to brace the skulls as he hauls them off into the deep, one corpse dragged along in each hand. 

Seahorses, Hubert considers. They are roughly of a size to his spawn, in terms of predator to prey ratio. The strange stiffness of the skeletons will occupy them for hours. It will take hours longer for Hubert to catch enough for them to share, however. And sometimes they prefer certain…colors.

Rays, he decides instead. There are none local, but if he journeys far enough south he can snatch one up. While their value as sustenance is minimal, the refinement of their tiny interlaced bones has always fascinated him. In terms of educational value—

He stills.

Yes. This is what his life has been reduced to. Pondering the education of murderous spawn. Instinct kept him nearby until the eggs hatched, but this, now, is. Excessive.

They will die in open waters. 

But no one ever had to teach Hubert how to hunt, how to hide, how to scream at the world until it granted him one more day of pain and hunger, ill-formed cartilage shifting under his too-thin skin. Eelfolk have no family. They hatch into the void and wriggle straight into the bellies of cleverer beasts, and mer laugh at what wretched, feral snacks they make for sharks.

Speaking of sharks, Hubert has reached his destination. 

The problem with corpses on the shore is that they will inevitably draw in other landwalkers, who will search the area, become trespassers, and create new corpses. (Multiplication — another lesson he needs to teach.) Abandoning them in deep water will not solve the issue, since filth floats all too easily. Abandoning them in another’s gullet will.

All the blood has run dry from the long swim, so Hubert cracks open each chest cavity and leaves the bodies broken on the seafloor. The current handles it from there.

He does not wait long for a massive shadow to overtake him.

“You,” she sighs, and Hubert does not quake.

A shark of Ingrid’s size could crush his ribcage against the seafloor with a flick of her tail. He is longer. Quicker. This does not leave them at an impasse, and it does not make them friends. He gestures at the feast carved open on the rocks beneath. 

“An offering of good will.”

Her eyes roll in her skull. “You bring nothing good, fussy bastard. What is wrong with them?”

“Human.”

“I have eyes. You have no taste.” Ingrid sinks to the makeshift table, nares flashing as she breathes in the scent. Her mouth opens wider than his could dream, displaying a devastating array of teeth each as big as Hubert’s thumbs. “Be gone.”

Hubert swims so fast his tail slaps against the sandy floor, and he does not stop until the reek of human blood has faded from his claws.

He can deal with the other beasts of the deep and the fancy folk who think hiding their teeth makes them _better._ It is too much for his spawn to manage. Even with a feat of perfect teamwork, they can barely take down a single shrimp — how are they to navigate politics, alliances?

Hubert cannot teach this. 

He cannot teach _anything._ His spawn are too clever, too confoundingly stupid. They tussle and curl up together, show fear and affection and courage. They are little worms with bubbles for brains, and every last speck of them is human. 

But what else can he do? He cannot set them free, nor can he keep them caged, especially now that humans have stumbled upon their den. 

They must move. Where? There is no home for them among the haughty mer, nor in Edelgard’s roaming rebellion. 

Ferdinand would want to stow them in a bathtub. _A basin the size of a rowboat,_ he had explained upon inviting Hubert to stay with him, _but made of a ceramic white as bone._ And then the servants would go screaming, and a new corpse would appear on Hubert’s doorstep, orange tresses streaming in the gentle waves to call a final farewell.

Hubris. That’s all this is. Hubert dared for one moment to reach for something beyond the abyss of solitude, to follow a guileless smile, and now the riptide will tear it away once more. 

Even now, instinct tells him to keep swimming. Away from his spawn. Away from the den. Away from that trickle of sweet blood in the current.

Sweet human blood.

Fear strikes him.

Twenty lengths back to the den. 

Hubert does not blink. Does not breathe.

He missed it the first time. The trespassers’ movements caught his attention, and then their blood was everywhere, and he did not think to check, could not return to the den with human blood still painting his claws, and under it all, he missed—

They weren’t bumbling through his territory.

They were fleeing the den they had already ransacked.

Hubert flits through the rocky opening to his cavern, swallowing back a useless cry, for his spawn are still too young to vocalize, it will do no good, it is pitiful desperation and weakness and his every loathsome nightmare.

It bursts from him all the same as he breaks the surface and finds Ferdinand’s body. Silent. Bloody. Leaking a steady stream of heady red into the fouled water, just like the twin corpses Hubert dragged south, leaving his mate to die.

He _howls._

Human blood in the water, and there are his spawn with their murderous teeth, bowing to instinct and burying themselves in their father’s still-warm flesh. They swarm over the body in a writhing mass, and Hubert cannot—where to lay his hands that he will not squish them, blighted wretches that they are—he knew, he always knew it would come to this, chased Ferdinand away for weeks to prevent—

 _“Ferdinand,”_ he croaks, pressing his forehead to a still-warm cheek.

“Oh!” slurs a hazy voice in turn. “Hubert. You are back!”

Hubert jolts away.

The tadpoles startle and pool into Ferdinand’s lap, where his hand makes gentle waves for them to dance around. They do not bite. Ferdinand’s body does not leech blood into the water from a hundred eager bites, but a single gouge in his side made by a human knife. A thick wad of seaweed has been pressed into the wound to staunch the bleeding. 

“Your hunts never take so long,” Ferdinand complains as Hubert carefully, so carefully brings the flat of his palm to press over his lover’s injured side in wonder—they scented blood and did not feed, they did not hurt him, he did not scream…?

“Hubert. Hubert? I do not think we can stay here. The poachers—”

He presses his face to the sweet, milky skin of Ferdinand’s throat, now wrinkled from his time in the water. “Rest,” he rasps.

But Ferdinand’s fingers tangle in Hubert’s hair, slicking it away from his face before holding taut. “No. Sleep is a nightmare. I will wake up and you will be gone from this place and I will never see my family again and I will not bear it. I will not. They are so small, Hubert. Do you understand how small they are? I have to be here.”

There is a drug in the water, but it is surely shock and blood loss that have Ferdinand rambling like this, his whispers increasingly frenzied. 

“Please, Hubert? Please, if I fall asleep, do not…” He shivers, and his hands fall back to the water. “Please. Promise me, lover. Do not disappear.”

_Do not leave me alone._

But better alone than dead.

“Rest,” Hubert tells him again. “You are not well…lover.”

The name, uncertain as it is, seems to calm Ferdinand from his ravings. His eyes are so wide as they stare at Hubert in the darkness, pupils swallowing the ring of tawny gold.

That gaze quickly becomes unbearable, and Hubert turns away to ensure none of his spawn are straggling through the fouled water. The tide pools have miraculously remained clean enough for some of the netting around his heart to ease. 

“I have a friend,” Ferdinand announces, just when Hubert thinks he has finally slipped away into uneasy unconsciousness. “She hates—landwalkers, yes? Landwalkers. As much as you do. And she has a house on an island, so no one ever bothers her, and, and she is my friend. Could we go there? Together?” 

Ferdinand’s face is wet. It is not from the tide. 

“Couldn’t we try this together?” he begs, voice cracking like dried grass on the shore. 

“Why would you want to?” Hubert hisses. His claws curl over Ferdinand’s wound, shallowly piercing the skin, agony to agony. “We are not your kin. We are _monsters.”_

A flash of anger finally passes over Ferdinand’s pitiful expression, and when he smiles there is blood on his teeth, as if to say _better monsters than men._

“I want,” Ferdinand swears. And Hubert, damn him, believes.


	6. Moonlight

Their second big adventure is no less exciting than the first. But definitely less bloody. They haven’t yet decided if that is a good thing or a bad thing. 

When Sire hunts and brings home strange creatures to carve open, describing the viscera with solemn severity, the blood in the water drives Them all to frenzy, teeth nipping madly for fresh flesh as Sire sighs and holds the corpse Above, out of reach until They calm.

Papa’s blood in the water is different. Even now, halfway healed and all wrapped up in strange white threads, his wound frightens Them. As They tumble around the tub, peeping for attention and songs and stories, each lingers to press a bony brow to Papa’s injured side. A good luck charm, that burning heat of flesh knitting itself back together. 

They are so glad Sire did not try to instruct Them about Papa’s viscera.

Anyway. Back to the adventure. They are _moving!_ The den was too small once Shining—Their Papa!!!—joined. Sire made him a bed of smooth stone and softest kelp, and they lay there together for a week, whispering in tones They could not understand. Whenever Sire went to hunt, Papa would ease himself into the water to rest with Them instead, and Sire would shout and snarl to find him all wrinkly later. Papa only smiled. 

They are learning what smiles are. Their jaws do not click that way yet. _Yet._

And then one day Sire returned with a…thing. 

_“And what, perchance, is that meant to be?”_

_“A rowboat. Clearly.”_

_“It is a boat indeed. But if I am meant to row it, then where are the oars?”_

_“…Ah.”_

_“Do you intend to pull us all the way out to sea?”_

_Sire humphed and harrumphed and returned hours later with a very long rope. Papa threw up his hands._

_“Hubert. Honestly. You will dislocate something if you—”_

_“Get in the boat, Ferdinand.”_

_Splashing. “Yes, yes, you brave and strapping fish, you. Here I am. In the tug-boat. What is next in your master plan?”_

_Sire curled his claws over the edge of the wood and yanked it down into the water, like a pelican taking a massive gulp. Satisfied at the water level, he cupped his claws and began to transfer tadpole after tadpole into the half-sunken tug-boat._

_“More akin to a bathtub than a boat,” Papa grumbled._

_Sire’s voice was flat and sharp and oddly soft. “Anything for you.”_

They all sit in it now, this thing of many names. They call it a tub.

All of Their worldly possessions have been abandoned at the old den except for three: the teacup, a really _really_ cool jawbone with teeth, and Papa. That’s okay. They can always find more bones. But not a new Papa.

There’s only one of him, and Sire must understand that too, because he’s working so hard to pull Papa’s tub all the way to the new den! Sire didn’t bring any possessions except for the teacup, which is Theirs, and Papa, which is Theirs. 

Sometimes the tub gets too low and Papa squawks and they all fall out. Then Sire will haul the tub into the Above, pour out all the water, pour back _half_ the water, complain until Papa hauls himself back in (holding on to Their bone so They do not lose it because it is Theirs), and then dash around catching Them up in the teacup to be delivered back to the tub. He gets very scared every time he has to count passengers and tries not to show it, even when Papa puts his big lips onto Sire’s eyes and mouth.

That’s how They know Sire has precisely sixty-two possessions: Them. 

(Papa doesn’t count because he belongs to Them, not Sire.)

Oh! And Papa has something called a sheet. It’s white like the threads over his wound but much bigger, big enough to cover the whole tub. When it is brightness time he spreads it out and refuses to let any of Them see the sunfire. 

Probably he has to recharge. That makes sense for a Shining.

Sometimes he asks Sire if he feels like a fishbake yet, and Sire will stop pulling and curl up under the boat to blow angry bubbles instead.

Darkness time is nicer. Papa pushes the sheet into a big soggy ball and tucks it under his head, scooting down in the tub so all of Them can wriggle onto his chest for a better vantage point. The whole world is dim and shadowed like the den used to be, and the Above does not seem so frightening when all that’s up there are some twinkling shells and a big white eye hanging low in the sky. 

Papa’s chest rumbles under Them, warm in the shallow water, as he strings the sky-shells together with the most wondrous tales. They peep for another, another, another—

“Can you look up?” Papa asks tiredly. 

Everything stills, and a moment later a head emerges from the water. Pale eyes glimmer over the lip of the tub. “Excuse me?”

“Your neck. I was never sure… You don’t look up, much. I wondered if you ever simply laid back in the water to gaze at the moon.”

The tub rocks gently in a way at odds with the waves. Sire has wrapped himself around it, three times at least, and his tail curls up out of the water to press against Papa’s cheek. “I don’t care to.”

“A pity. It is beautiful tonight.”

“There are more important things,” Sire says. His voice is strange, as if his own viscera threaten to spill from his throat. “Right in front of me.”

Water leaks from Papa’s eyes and laughter from his throat. “When we are home, you will lie with me in the moonlight. Just you and I.”

“Demanding.” His eyes shine the same as Theirs. 

They are going _home._


	7. Rewind

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Many years earlier...

“Princess…”

Hubert bristled at the the other mer’s tone even before Edelgard gave a precise quarter-turn in the water and lifted a delicate brow. At merely eleven, she had already mastered her acrobatics to account for her diminutive size; no matter how imposing the mer that approached her, servant or soldier or simpering noble, she knew how to draw the gaze and control the current. 

But she did not know how to stop _this,_ and every time she tried felt like another line of razor twine digging into the soft of Hubert’s belly. 

“Yes?” she snapped, aiming for imperious. Ill-suited for a silver minnow of a girl.

“You know better than to have your pet off leash, Princess.”

Edelgard’s hands dropped to her waist, elbows stuck out wide in imitation of a puffer. “And _you_ know better than to call Hubert a pet! We were attending one of Ser Hanneman’s lectures. We students listen best without collars around our necks.”

_He’s perfectly behaved._

_He won’t bite anyone._

_He just wants to learn._

The other mer shot Hubert a disbelieving scowl, and Hubert pulled back his thin lips to reveal a trustworthy smile of a hundred needle-tipped teeth. His secondary jaw trembled in his throat, eager.

“I will not hear another word of slander. Come, Hubert. We must prepare for the afternoon assembly.” Her slim white fingers closed over the gnarled bone of his shoulder, and she directed him gently away.

Edelgard insisted upon swimming at his side, because only servants swam in her vanguard and rearguard, and she would much rather have a friend. Her overbearing concern had always soothed the awkwardness of making up for their differences in size and speed, but now, spiraling through the water in the painful clench of muscles and gyrating vertebrae that allowed him to keep a meandering pace, he felt every bit the puppet.

Every eye slid to them as they coasted through Adrestia’s main thoroughfare. Hateful and concerned. Such a thin line between.

_Vicious thing. Vile creature._

_Poor thing. Pitiful creature._

A mindless fish either way.

But the public eye was unavoidable. Edelgard was the princess. Hubert did not know that fact a half dozen years earlier when he discovered a scrumptious mer-pup bawling in a fisherman’s net. He only knew that she did not scream when he took his loathsome teeth to the rope, and she did not scream as she clung to her rescuer’s ashen neck, and the screaming only started when he guided her back home to her people. 

It never stopped a day since.

In front of the silver mirror of her chamber, it was easy to see why. Ten years gave a mer their rosy cheeks, their plush torsos and soft skin, all seagrass-fine hair that shone in the light and blunt white teeth in polished smiles, and the proportionate bulk of a powerful tail with scales of abalone’s rainbow gloss. Even silvered with the sea’s horrors, Edelgard had grown into a spirit of moonlight and promise. Her eyes followed him in the mirror, her brows drawn tight by whatever she saw there.

Ten years on, it was clear why an eel could not be considered mer. No harmony united his warring parts: four-fifths consisted of thick, mottled grey tail, dark as a shelf of aged volcanic rock, and the remaining fifth could most charitably be termed…underdeveloped. 

A handsome face would not drag an eel howling to adulthood. Hubert reminded himself of this fact every time he glimpsed the sunken nares, the bulbous brows and scabbed lips that greeted him in every reflection. The faint beginnings of hair had begun to sprout from his scalp, and he had not yet lost his juvenile teeth for an adult’s more agile set. They clashed in his mouth and sliced up his tongue whenever he rasped his feeble vocalizations in Edelgard’s ear. 

His arms, vestigial at best for the first few years, had only recently roared to agony as the bones began to solidify within the soft fin-like protrusions. Smaller, more manageable claws would sprout from his mangled hands in time.

For now, he dragged those frail fingers through Edelgard’s hair and shaped a loose braid with his growing dexterity. 

When he met her eyes through the mirror once more, they had turned glassy with sorrow. “You are leaving me again,” she said. 

A fact, not an accusation.

 **“Yes,”** he forced from his throat in a spew of froth.

Edelgard pulled the braid over her shoulder and fiddled with the end. “You will come back. You always do.”

He leaned forward to rest his forehead against the span of her small shoulders. True enough. Loneliness drove him back to her care and charity as often as it drove him away.

“Well. It doesn’t change anything, I suppose.” She rallied admirably. “Either I will have fixed everything and made this a home for you by the time you get back, or we’ll just have to do it together. But I _will_ do it. There is no reason for…” 

Her fingers closed into the knots of her braid, as though she imagined claws on her own fingers to rend through every barrier, every lord that valued one life above another, every lady who fattened one child to let another starve. 

Such a world it would be, stripped of the fickle niceties of mer society. But it would not be for him.

All he needed was blood to glut his stomach and an endless empty sea. Nothing more. Yet he still drew his nares across her skin to remember the scent of warmth, of home, before he slipped away into the dark.


	8. Epilogue: Free

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A look at happily, murderously ever after :')
> 
> [Warning for brief mentions of ableism in mer and human societies.]

There have been troubling reports from the southern archipelago for months now — overgrazed kelp beds, dwindling fish populations, a barrage of seagull bones emanating from the islands — but nothing like this.

A human skeleton drawn and quartered, with the bones knotted together in twine lest the tide drag them away. 

“We found it a half mile out from the dock,” Caspar explains, even as he absolutely refuses to look at it.

Edelgard rubs at her forehead. “So you brought it _home?”_

“It’s quite skilled.” Linhardt fiddles with the net he’d wrapped it into for transport, allowing it to unfurl like an eerie anemone. “There are no signs of scavengers. The corpse is completely untouched. I believe they poisoned it in such a way to leave it unpalatable and thereby preserved as a warning for the longest time possible.”

“A warning of what, exactly?” 

“Haven’t the swampiest.”

“Pirates!” Caspar kicks up a few yards, drawing all eyes away from the mess Linhardt dragged into the throne room. “It’s gotta be pirates! They’re taking over the islands and killing anyone who catches them!”

“There are no signs of ships, either.”

“Flying pirates! The gulls were close to cracking the mystery, they had to be whacked—”

She ignores him in favor of swimming closer to Linhardt, who has been peering closely at the twine knotwork. “You truly found nothing else?”

“Mm. That old manor is still there on the main island. Some dirt’s been moved around topside, but no new structures. The sea is silent. Healthy and silent.” He tilts his head. “We thought we saw seal pups from a distance. Fat, dark little things. I counted at least two dozen. By the time we hit the beach, they were gone.”

This is the fifth reconnaissance mission Edelgard has sent to the islands. The others all returned with a similar if abbreviated tale: eerie silence in the sea. Certainly no ritualized corpses. 

This is a clear escalation. 

“Edelgard. I don’t think hands tied these. The twine looks touched by…teeth.”

The archipelago is only five hours beyond the Brigid Canyon, their border with the neighboring sea. She cannot risk this spilling over into Petra’s waters. If anything infringed upon the hunting grounds of their dolphin pods, or worse, endangered the elder whales—

No. The risk is too great. Edelgard will accept no more failures.

She will put the mystery to bed herself.

  


—

  


When she stormed Garreg Gulf and brought an end to the hegemony of the Sainted Mer, Edelgard knew no fear. Anxiety still takes no root in her steady heart, even with her axe long laid down, even as she swims through the eerily abandoned kelp forest on the islands’ outskirts. 

The brightly colored minnows and colonies of ruddy-tailed shrimp are nowhere to be found. The only sound is the steady beating of her tail guiding her on through the depths.

She does not yet feel watched despite the many hidden vantage points. The seafloor is broken up by small hollows in the rock, shaped too precisely to be natural coral formations. All are empty.

At the sight of the original warning, she finds no further bodies strung up in the deep. The dock is too small to service anything larger than a rowboat. There are only bones, bones, and strange strings of knotted shells and glass beads. 

On her third loop around the islands, Edelgard’s eye snags on the gaping mouth of a cave down in the rock. It must have been no more than a crack before, but hard labor has opened it up and cleared it of debris. Edelgard spies no flora within the smooth walls, and it is far too deep for light to penetrate. She brought no lantern fish of her own.

She will not turn her back on the dark and unknown. 

In the abyss, silent and cold, the watchers find her at last. A pair of slate-grey eyes pop open to her left, then another in pale yellow farther down the tunnel. They do not approach her. They do not answer when she calls out. When she swims on past them, the creatures fold in behind her, and soon there are dozens of eyes following her with their wide white sclera. 

Edelgard has not seen eyes like this in many years, but recognizes them instantly. They are familiar still.

Eels.

Far be it from her to underestimate their cleverness, but everything about this is wrong. At least thirty of them are trailing behind her now. She has never seen the eelfolk abide their own kind; they scarcely abide any beyond their food to begin with. For them to gather like this is perfectly unbelievable, and she doubts herself a dozen times before the tunnel tilts upwards and suddenly breaks into a cavern of light.

The stone breaks to the surface above, the sun’s strength filtering down into this little chamber of crystalline water. Every wall is decorated with murals of amber stone and glass. Edelgard’s eerie retinue swims in blithely after her, and in the light she gets her first true look at them.

Seal pups, Linhardt said. Fat, dark little things.

No wonder he knew not what he truly saw.

The eelings spark an aesthetic horror for any raised among the sleek, mathematically perfected architecture of Adrestia and the other mer palaces. Rather than miniaturized versions of their adult forms, they are composed of a hundred gaunt angles cobbled together under layers of flaking skin and protective fat. Their upper halves are pale as the sand itself, the skin pulled taut over cartilage still struggling to form bone, and it leaves sunken pits for their eyes and nares as they grow into their faces. The unformed nubs of their arms provide gnarled holders for a handful of daggers on each side, and their torsos twist in unnatural gyrations, skeletons still driven toward the needs of their lower halves instead of the broader, firmer structure that will eventually support their mer halves. 

At the join of their tails, skin meets skin like wood to stone, and their fat bellies span the divide in these few years before the sides truly specialize. The ring of bulk tapers down into tails so long they each surpass Edelgard’s adult height, and the children knot them around each other as if holding hands, like little otters scared to drift away in their sleep. In the light she can see they are not all ink black, though the color dominates the occasional streaks of copper and mottled grassy greens. 

Strangest of all, a quarter of them have _hair_ upon their bulbous heads. For some it is the faintest wisps of orange, like sea grass, yet others have full raggedy ponytails braided from thick black curls. A couple retain the vestigial fronds of their childhood gill-stalks clustered around the base of their skulls.

“Hello?” she offers cautiously to the audience. 

Every eye closes. Every head bows.

“Greetings, Lady of Adrestia.”

Edelgard whips around to discover the strangest eel of them all. They wear a sanguine coral crown over their bald pate, and from it long fronds of seaweed spill down over their broad shoulders. Their claws are trimmed down to allow dexterous little fingers free access, and along their flank are the scars of countless deep wounds that should have snatched this young spirit away as quick as a fisher’s hook.

“Greetings,” she mumbles in turn, as dumbfounded in this moment as in all her life’s travails combined.

“I am Prince of these lands. You may call me Pelican! We have long awaited your visit, My Lady.”

They can _speak._

She cannot move past it. Hubert, her old friend, took two decades to master the mer language despite his vicious cleverness. It simply does not come naturally to the looping lengths of an eel’s tongue, especially not before their musculature has reached its final form. Yet this creature, still small enough that she could gather him into her arms if not for the tail’s length, speaks not only _much,_ but _eloquently._

Are they migrants from a distant sea? Perhaps a new breed of mer entirely, a cousin to the eels yet biologically significant on their own. These islands have never been claimed for settlement, it is true, but to grant them succor in the borderseas will require some international wrangling…

“We know why you have come!” Pelican continues. “You have heard of our expertise at destroying unwelcome landwalkers.”

How many others have they killed? Or worse, consumed like the carnivores they are. If they are so antagonistic as to draw additional human attention, this will be a major issue.

She answers calmly, “Yes. We found your warning.”

Pelican’s shoulders jerk inward all of a sudden, his little fingers slipping together. She thought it a spasm at first, but no.

He clapped his hands. Tried to. Like a landwalker.

“My Lady! It was not meant to warn _you!_ But oh! We are pleased. You know we are clever, yes? And strong. And you have come. So we will be very, very happy to join your army!”

“My…army?”

“And go to School!”

Edelgard nearly repeats that word as well, but there is no need — a chorus of garbled chirping erupts around them.

_School!_

All her worries break into a haze of bubbling laughter. A new species? No, just as clever and eager as the old. When Hubert followed her back to Adrestia for an education all those years ago, she knew not what to do. But now the world is new. She will not forsake such children, no matter their bones and blades.

“You are most welcome,” she tells them with a smile, turning to finally greet each in turn. “I will make you a map. Or I can send a retinue to guide you, should you so please. The schools of my city turn none away.”

“Oh!” Pelican coos, darting forward to spiral around her in something slightly more formal than a joyous hug. His formal speech breaks a bit; he must have practiced the high-minded words from before. “Thank you! Thank you! We can go right away! But we will have to ask Sire and Papa first. Is that okay?”

Someone is breeding them.

“Of course.”

Edelgard should have guessed from the beginning. The isolated location, the sheer number of eels sharing close quarters, the strange traits and intelligence. She thought she wiped out all of the experimental research in her seas — Linhardt and Hanneman have assured her all traces have been expunged — but here they are. And who would care, with eels as stock instead of proper mer?

“Might I meet your Sire and Papa?” She gives them her most honest, least truthful smile. 

Pelican leads the way. Some of the other eelings scatter to spread the news of their upcoming journey, though most follow them through the tunnel system and weave through the side paths to show off their swift speed. Even Edelgard’s well-honed sense of direction can barely keep up with the labyrinthine paths.

Eventually Pelican points up to an opening in the ceiling where the sun sparkles beyond the water. They rise.

And a monster crashes in from above.

Edelgard hurls the child behind her, reaching for the axe she did not bring and readying herself to bolt with her passenger.

But the monster does not dive. The wild ripples settle to reveal four brown furred legs that paddle off to one side and romp up onto the shore. None of the eels have so much as flinched, and Pelican smiles strangely as he weaves back around her and breaks through the surface.

She follows with more care. Only her eyes peep above the calming waters.

There on the shore is another eel child, her reddened skin slick with strange oils that shine in the light. She reclines in a low tidal pool with her tail stretched out at its full length, but when she moves to chirp over the scruffy brown creature, it is clear something is wrong. Halfway down her tail the flesh dips as though sliced by a blade, and though she moves freely above that point, the lower part is limp and lifeless. Yet she is fat and happy with the monster in her spindly arms, its pink tongue dashing out to taste her face.

When finally the monster settles, the eel girl lifts a fragile arm and prepares to toss a golden ball back into the pool. Then she sees Edelgard’s piercing eyes, or the long tendrils of her silver hair rising to the surface, or some other phantom — and she freezes like a guppy in a cold snap. 

The monster begins to growl, yet other noises draw Edelgard’s attention more pointedly.

A familiar voice.

A sort of smacking not heard beneath the sea.

And whispers of such cloying, suffocating tenderness that she can barely distinguish them from the flowery scent that pervades the shallows. Land flora sprouts in every color around these clear pools, and boughs of heady purple blooms have been tied into an arch over a strange half-chair of twisted wicker. Edelgard finally lifts her head less for a better view and more to escape the smell; without water flowing over her nares, the sickly sweet begins to fade. 

If only her eyes could be so lucky. There, beneath the veil of blooms, slick black coils of wiry tail spill out and around a human enthroned upon the wicker chair. Though the seat takes all the weight, most of the human’s ruddy limbs are entwined with the eel’s grasping form. Their faces are masked behind the human’s fall of amber hair, except for where haggard claws slip through the tresses and stoke down over that fever-bright flesh. 

The human gasps and pulls away as if to collect itself in the face of such soul-shaking affection, and the predator’s face rises devilishly triumphant from behind the orange curtain. His tongue curls over the newly bruised site of recent kisses, and then he casts a perfunctory look back toward the pools of his children.

And Edelgard sees him in full.

_“Hubert?”_

“EDELGARD?”

The human springs to his feet with no ground to catch him, slips on Hubert’s writhing flank as he uncurls, and falls smack on his plush ass into the water. At once he is swarmed by the bodies of twenty eels, pulling on his hair and peeping and chortling and chanting: _School! School! Army! Army!_

“What are you doing here?” Hubert hisses, sliding into the deep where he can properly wrap himself into a pose of proper deference to his liege. 

Edelgard huffs angrily through her nares. “I believe those are my words. You disappear for a decade, and now I find you here doing—what, precisely? Playing with your food? You could have come home, Hubert.”

“I _am_ home.”

Her anger dissolves as easily as salt to surf, for the truth of it is clear. Never has she seen him as relaxed as he was in his mate’s arms. Never has she seen him truly happy. For all she wanted to remake mer for him, a thousand perfect cities would never be enough — he has only ever wanted his own kind, and her. 

And now a human as well.

She opens her mouth to apologize, but a cry cuts through the air. At once Hubert sweeps over to the sobbing, broken-tailed child in the shallows. He hoists her into the air with one strong arm, wraps her lifeless tail around his forearm, and then leans down with the other arm to scoop up the slobbering brown beast that has begun to whine in turn.

“You startled Hawksbill,” he grunts. A mortified dusting of darker grey has spread over his ashen skin.

“...Forgive me.” Edelgard swims closer, slow and careful, until she can lift the girl’s sharp chin and meet her leaking eyes. “My name is Edelgard, little Hawksbill. I apologize for spooking you in your home.”

The girl tucks her face into the join of Hubert’s armpit and will not be moved.

It is all so much. Hubert, _her_ Hubert, with a human mate and dozens upon dozens of living, thriving little eelings. In the wild only one, two of these children would have survived. They would not know speech. They would not imagine schools and armies. They would not keep pets, like Hawksbill and her four-legged monster, and they would certainly not weave crowns and baubles with only their sharp little teeth to guide the twine. 

They would not be cherished. There is no instinct for it among the eels. It must be the human traces in them, and yet Hubert cradles his girl with such care.

She shakes her head in wonder. “You let her live. I would have thought…” If Hubert had not rescued Edelgard as a girl, when she was a lost little pup trapped in a fisherman’s net, she would never have survived. To wriggle free would have meant tremendous damage to her tail. And a mer that cannot swim is no mer at all.

“Excuse me!” 

The human stomps over, barking in the harsh language of Aegir’s coast. “I will not have you speaking of my child in such a way! Yes, I do understand mer. No need to gape. Do you comprehend me?”

Hubert chuckles behind his daughter’s head, knowing all too well exactly how many trading tongues Edelgard has studied. 

For her own part, she merely inclines her head in agreement. 

“Papa,” Pelican whines from the water. “You cannot talk to Her Majesty like that! Or she won’t let us go to schooooool!”

A new choir of chirrups erupts, and Ferdinand turns to argue with mouth and hands alike. Edelgard watches the movements of his fingers and the clunky way some of the children respond with their own under-developed hands. 

“They are strange in the throat,” Hubert rumbles from behind her, weaving in close. He is still half-hiding behind his daughter. “Some do not vocalize at all. Ferdinand tells me there are landwalkers just the same, so he brought some of their language to spur the spawn. Now he struggles to keep pace.”

They are strange in more than that, she does not say. She is only mer. What does she know?

“What is this about school?” Ferdinand snaps when he turns around once more. “What did you promise them? They are much too small, it is simply out of the question.”

Edelgard raises her brows and addresses him in the Aegir tongue. “They are long as I.”

“Mola. Ball.” Ferdinand reaches down to where one eeling has immediately curled up, and he hoists up a thick mass of giggling tail. “She may be five times the length of your mer children—” He passes her suddenly into Edelgard’s arms, who expects to bow beneath the heavy weight and finds the burden effortless instead. “—But she is all sinew and cartilage. Fragile. I would scarcely send her away to a human school, were they less discerning in their students.”

“A private class,” Edelgard offers in correction. She hopes the subtle curve of her toothy smile reflects the joke.

He opens his mouth to say something more, then deflates in upon himself. Perhaps they have argued this before, he and Hubert. It must be hard to…

Everything. Everything about this is absurd. Ferdinand’s ease with the eelings may have eclipsed her shock for a few minutes, but it returns now in full force. Who in the Depths _is_ he?

“Well. If this is Hubert’s home, then I should like a tour.”

The men are silent for a long moment, trading glances over her shoulder. She takes the moment to appraise this Ferdinand in further detail. Hair long as any mer’s, his body tanned and toned from manual labor, yet possessed of the beauty of a summer sunset, he is surely among the landwalkers’ most alluring specimens. It is no struggle to accept that Hubert’s tastes veer toward such aesthetics; it is merely impossible to move past the legs. The thick, trained flesh. The honeyed blood that must dance through his veins. 

Her Hubert is a killer. To pluck such a morsel from the shore and keep it for a pet, or worse, treat it as an equal? Force no spawn upon its ripe corpse, but instead raise a happy brood of wriggling terrors together? She has much to ask her Hubert, and the human would be wise to make himself scarce.

“Ferdinand will show you,” Hubert announces instead. “I will tend to Hawksbill at the cove. Meet us there afterward.”

Shocked, Edelgard turns to question him and is hit by the full splash of his dive. The tip of his tail disappears into the network of caves in an instant.

Ferdinand appears equally put out. He dismisses the children with a clicked command, then puts down his arms to either side, fingers splaying nervously against the soaked linen of his pants. “Well. Come along then.”

“I will not flop after you upon the land.”

“…Of course not. It is not an issue, Lady Edelgard. The entire island is outfitted for mutual thriving.”

And to her awe, it is true.

Beneath the waves are the network of caves and tunnels that Hubert has carved, and above them are the deep trenches and pools that Ferdinand has dug into the earth. There are channels crisscrossing the land, shallows to allow the children to tend to nearby gardens, deep hideaways disconnected from the tides for protection during storms, a maze of playgrounds and sandy beaches and even slides built into the heaps of excavated soil. 

Little heads pop up from the water wherever they go, claws and tails and seaweed braids all waving at her. Ferdinand greets each child by name. 

“How many are there?” Edelgard asks at last, breaking their strangely wounded silence.

“Sixty-two.”

There is no gentle way to put this. “How many did you bear?”

Ferdinand flinches at the question. Perhaps he did not? But surely Hubert could not… No, clarifying is far too rude, and entirely not the question at fin.

“We began with sixty-two,” Ferdinand answers after a pause. “We have not lost a one. I pray we never do.”

Although none are quite so wounded as Hawksbill, Edelgard has noted a few others with strange swimming habits. Whether from injuries or genetic incompatibilities, she cannot say. Mixed mer are not common.

“They are safe and happy here. I have made certain of it above all else. And…we go out in my boat together, when the weather is kind.”

He is afraid. Afraid she will take his children away, afraid they will not survive a trek through the open sea, afraid they will be as fearless and bold as their Sire. This, she understands. Already she would grieve to see them do anything less than thrive.

They are her Hubert’s. This makes them _hers._

“But they grow bigger by the day, and the islands do not,” she argues. “They must go farther and farther from shore to hunt. They need larger and more varied food. Your paradise is unsustainable. A deeper trench will not change that, Ferdinand.” 

She hauls herself out of the channel and into a bed of low, dense wildflowers. The names of all surface flora are beyond her, yet she can appreciate the soft petals as they bruise beneath her fingers. “Sit with me.”

The truth of her words weighs upon him, troubling his spirit. His love for this family is more present than the rocks and wind. He sits.

“You know all sixty-two by name. You know their strengths. Their dreams. You know which would thrive in my city and which need nothing but the moon to guide them. And I know what is possible when I will it.”

  


—

  


They talk about everything.

About the children who will venture to Adrestia for two weeks each month, guided on their journey by Edelgard’s most trusted and effusively happy guard. About the ones that shun the company of others and have faith only in their own claws and the occasional hugs from Papa. Those she will refer to Queen Petra’s guidance, who has great need for solitary rangers in the borderseas. The others, enthusiastic yet not fully in control of tongues or temper, will be tasked with greeting the elder whales as they pass through these waters. As they grow into themselves, new possibilities will open to them. No one need leap any geyser to be welcome in Adrestia.

Ferdinand recounts how they came to live on this island thanks to the young woman who technically owns the house. Lady Varley has been ever gracious to them, Ferdinand explains, and the children adore her like kittens to a sunbeam, whatever that means. Her father used to send horrid letters about coming to drag her away, but he finally gave up a season earlier to everyone’s tremendous relief. Perhaps work tied him up and he decided there was no profit in harassing his daughter further.

(Edelgard smiles and nods. If the man is who she thinks, he is certainly tied up. Eternally.)

After Ferdinand marches off to tell Barnacle to stop stealing Mola’s sodden sack of stuffing (a toy?), Edelgard gently inquires about how the children were named. They were not, is the thing, because Ferdinand and Hubert argued so loudly and so long over how the names should be chosen that the children just named each other instead. The resulting hodgepodge reflects their fears, their interests, and, in some cases, the most reckless fight they ever got into. He refrains from retelling Pelican’s origin story, to Edelgard’s simmering disappointment. She will have to ask the lad herself.

They talk, finally, haltingly, about Hubert, who hides from his oldest friend as skittish as a seahorse. 

“He once did the same to me,” Ferdinand admits. “Hid himself and our brood for fear I would reject them. Your opinion matters to him more than anything, Lady Edelgard. He hid from me for months. That it has been years since he last showed his face to you…it speaks for him, I think.”

She has much to say on that note, and none of the words to suit it, but all plans go awry when Hawksbill’s creature comes barking and slobbering at them. 

It appears to be something called a Dog which the landwalkers keep for companionship, much the same way people keep seals in Adrestia. Once Hawksbill grows big enough to properly hold a harness, this “dog” will assist her through the aboveground waterways by means of a land-chariot, and she will no longer need to depend on her parents. The idea so excites Ferdinand that he allows the creature to lick all over his face. Edelgard declines that honor.

The dog dashes on ahead as Ferdinand leads her down to the cove. The scarlet sunset spreads out before them, and as Edelgard makes her way down the sandy bank, her heart dances to see so many eelings clustered on the shore. 

Hubert is there as well, curled along the top of the rock wall that protects the inlet from sea and storm. His tail dances languidly in the water as the children wheel around it. Not an inch of stress tightens his limber frame; the breeze itself must envy his happy grace.

Edelgard catches herself from staring, then turns to find Ferdinand doing just the same. They smile at each other awkwardly.

“Thank you,” she blurts, a sudden hook of loneliness catching upon her heartstrings. “For being what you are to him."

“The same to you, My Lady. For what you are to all of us.”

A rare blush festers around her collar, and she turns away at once lest he notice it. Hawksbill’s dog is circling back for another chance to taste her skin. With a jump and a splash, Edelgard leaves it behind on the shore, then circles thrice with the children before cresting the waves with a laugh. She had been so long above the waves her hair had dried! How rare.

Some of the children gathered in the shallows clap their tails against the rocks in awe. Their chattering noises are as meaningless as a seagull’s cry, yet Edelgard preens in the appreciation all the same. She slips closer to the group and spies a small human trying to fold itself out of sight, like a remora keeping itself eclipsed by much larger fish. 

Even as it seeks to hide, its hand moves a piece of graphite furiously over a pale white tablet.

“Hello,” Edelgard greets as she rises from the water, foam clinging to her flanks as her white tresses spill down her shoulders. “You must be Lady Varley.”

It is a polite enough greeting.

It is no reason for the woman to scream and fall faint right there in the sand.

Edelgard snatches up the tablet before it can slide away into the surf, cursing when her fingers leave wet imprints upon the fragile sheets. Thankfully it appears to be only a rough sketch, though all the likenesses are clear: the happy children, the unconquered lovers, the paradise so carefully constructed.

And the new outline of a queen rising triumphant from the surf.


End file.
